Featured: Mission to Mars

Mars – Earth’s next-door neighbor, located “just” tens of millions of miles away. For decades, the idea of journeying to the Red Planet has fascinated humanity. Thanks to missions ranging from NASA’s first flybys in the 1960s to present-day land rover explorations on the Martian surface, we’ve collected copious amounts of data. And all the while, we’ve hoped to see a day when humans could actually set foot on Mars’ surface.

BWX Technologies, Inc. (BWXT) is working with NASA in an effort to bring a concept once perceived as science fiction to reality.

To reduce the development timeframe and costs for a Mission to Mars, BWXT is working with NASA on an in-space flight demonstration evaluation project. This project will require BWXT to provide important design and testing insights on operating an NTP system in space in the 2020s. BWXT is responsible for initiating conceptual designs for an NTP reactor. These designs will be included as part of the project to evaluate whether the integrated system will function as designed in space; they will ultimately lead to future systems designed to propel a spacecraft from Earth's orbit to Mars and back.

The NTP project seeks to dramatically decrease travel time to and from Mars while also increasing payload size. Compared to its chemical counterpart, a nuclear thermal rocket possesses twice the propulsion efficiency thanks to its high-thrust engine and its ability to accelerate propellant at high speeds. Given NTP’s advantages over traditional chemical propulsion systems, NASA estimates that this technology will reduce transit to the Red Planet from six months to just four months.

“NTP is an extraordinarily exciting new program for BWXT. The exploration of space is a noble endeavor, and no one is better qualified to design and build reactors for the remote and challenging environment of space than BWXT.”

- Rex Geveden, BWXT President and CEO

BWXT’s interplanetary ventures began in the 1960s, when the company participated as a subcontractor in the U.S. Space Nuclear Program. The doorway into space exploration widened in the early 1980s thanks to a partnership with Brookhaven National Laboratory. Together, the two entities were leading proponents of the Particle Bed Reactor (PBR), a concept developed from BWXT’s previous nuclear propulsion work and evaluated by NASA’s Space Exploration Initiative.

In 1987, BWXT received a contract to design a space nuclear thermal propulsion (SNTP) system in support of the U.S. Department of Defense’s SNTP program. The program sought to develop a lighter and smaller second-generation, PBR-based nuclear rocket. While the program ceased at the end of the Cold War in 1993, the PBR was extensively tested and validated, signaling a giant leap forward in the size reduction of NTP engines.

NASA's Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Overview

Use of NASA content is not an express or implicit endorsement by NASA of the BWXT products or services described herein.

In the 1990s, BWXT was instrumental in the exploration of other planets, providing power systems and manufacturing capability for the U.S. Department of Energy. One of the more notable missions associated with the initiative was the Cassini-Huygens, a dual-element spacecraft tasked with collecting detailed measurements and images from Saturn. After capturing incredible photographs of the planet’s ring system, Cassini’s 20-year mission officially came to an end, transmitting valuable data back to Earth before disintegrating into Saturn’s atmosphere.

The solar system’s largest planet became the subject of potential exploration in 2003, as BWXT supported development of a reactor plant for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) under Project Prometheus. Before its cancellation in 2005, the mission sought to utilize nuclear power and propulsion technologies to explore the subsurface oceans of Jupiter’s three ice-covered moons.

Although previous nuclear propulsion concepts relied on high-enriched uranium, BWXT’s latest design utilizes low-enriched uranium-based fuel. In addition to determining the feasibility of using low-enriched fuel, the NTP project will also test and refine the manufacturing of the system’s fuel elements throughout the next year.